Tin soldier's lost battle against Calcutta's trash: A vestige from Britain lies neglected in city
Telegraph | 1 April 2025
“Tin Man” stands like Patience on the pavement, smiling at impending grief, near Gate C of Calcutta High Court. Empty bottles, polystyrene cups, plastic bags and whatnot are strewn around it every day.
Yet, nobody gives a hoot about what may — even after more than a century — serve as encouragement to come up with innovative ideas to collect garbage.
Resembling a paper shredder with several fangs, the iron contraption has the words “Street Orderly Bin” engraved on it, still clearly visible despite a layer of grime and the march of time.
Obscuring it is the line of cars parked before it and the never-ending procession of people hurrying towards the court, hoping to find justice, no matter how unjust the volume of garbage scattered in almost every city neighbourhood.
There are no records of how “Street Orderly Bins” arrived in Calcutta or what happened to them.
A snippet dated April 25, 1901, in the Engineering News and American Railway Journal (issue January to June) throws some light: “Bids are asked until July 1 for furnishing 50 orderly bins. J.C. Lynam, Secy. Corporation, Calcutta.”
A January 1901 issue of the finance and trade journal Dun’s Review has something similar: “Supply of 50 orderly bins delivered at the Corporation Workshops, Entally. Tenderers must send drawings, with dimensions marked thereon, stating material (which must be the best of its kind), price for the lot and date of delivery. Each bin must have the words ‘Orderly Bin’ in large raised letters cast thereon.”
The contraption was no stranger to the Britain of the 19th century.
Joseph Whitworth, an English inventor and entrepreneur, devised several items during his lifetime and was behind the British Standard Whitworth, an imperial-unit-based screw thread standard.
The Civil Engineer and Architect’s Journal of 1843 (volume six) mentions Whitworth’s “sweeping machine” that was brought into operation in Manchester. It used the “rotary motion of locomotive wheels, moved by horse or other power, to raise the loose soil from the surface of the ground and deposit it in a vehicle attached”.
What we see near Calcutta High Court could be the deposit box from one of the vehicles. But there is another possibility.
Sometime in the 1800s, to tackle dust and horse-dropping in London, people were stationed at fixed intervals along the streets, each waiting with a brush and dust shovel. A “remedy” came in the form of the “Street Orderly Bin”.
An issue of The Builder journal from February 1877 mentions a cast-iron square pillar “between the size of an ordinary guard-post and that of a pillar letter-box” being fixed inside the kerbstone. At the top was an opening supplied with a sliding door.
Dirt was put into this opening and it accumulated during the day; at night “scavengers” lifted up “a sliding-door at the bottom” and took out the dirt as it fell “down the shaft”.
Over 500 of these bins had been supplied to London back then and they were also used in Birmingham, Sheffield, Liverpool and other places.
Calcutta appears to have been ahead on the garbage-cleaning curve compared with New York from that era. There was a time when New Yorkers “dumped their trash onto the streets in anticipation of its collection by scavengers”, the historian Catherine McNeur writes in Taming Manhattan. Rotten food, dead animals and piles of manure created a stench.
Only in 1919 did New York mayor John Hylan propose that a fleet of incinerators be placed throughout the boroughs.
Back to 2025. As the rubbish piles up, “Tin Man” near Calcutta High Court continues to feebly remind us of the need to rise above the problem.